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Holocaust by Bullets: Yahad – In Unum, 10 Years of Investigation

Holocaust By Bullets

On display February 11, 2017 – April 16, 2017

Holocaust By Bullets features ten years of field investigations in the former Soviet Union by Yahad – In Unum. Yahad – In Unum, founded by French Catholic Priest Father Patrick Desbois, presents its painstaking research in a succinct yet approachable manner that enables the visitor to uncover, step‐by‐step, the crime committed against Jews and Roma by the Nazi killing units.

Known as the “Holocaust by Bullets”, the systematic killing of all Jews started before the creation of concentration camps and continued until WWII‘s end throughout the ex‐Soviet Union from 1942 to 1944. The exhibit gives viewers a chance to learn about this lesser‐known side of the Holocaust, through eyewitness testimonies, photographs, and maps. The exhibit presents Yahad’s identification of five steps of the crime that took place almost systematically for every mass killing throughout Eastern Europe leading up to the executions—the arrest, the road, the undressing, the shooting, and after the executions, the looting.

Yahad – In Unum is a Paris-based organization dedicated to collecting testimonies of eyewitnesses, and identifying and documenting sites of mass crimes committed against Jews and Roma by the Germans and their collaborators during World War II in Eastern Europe. Stemming from the initiative of its founder and president, French Catholic priest Father Patrick Desbois, since 2004 the organization has identified over 1,400 execution sites and interviewed close to 4,000 eyewitnesses in 8 countries.

Father Desbois has spent his life researching the Holocaust, fighting antisemitism, and furthering relations between Catholics and Jews. The exhibition focuses on Father Desbois and Yahad – In Unum’s research in Eastern Europe.

The form of genocide detailed by Yahad – In Unum’s exhibition is unlike any other study of genocidal activity ever conducted and presented.

In the exhibition, Yahad – In Unum presents its painstaking 10 years of research in a succinct yet appropriate manner allowing the visitor to uncover, step-by-step, the crime committed against Jews and Roma by the Nazi killing units, their Axis supporters, and local collaborators in Eastern Europe.

Mass killings in places such as Cambodia, Darfur, the Balkans and Syria are modeled after what Yahad’s founder Father Patrick Desbois calls the archetype of these horrors – those village-by-village, on site massacres – perpetrated by the Nazis and their collaborators.